[busterarm]

Call it what it is then. It's not a challenge but a weed-out. I know full well that that's what your company is screening for, but that also means that I know that I don't want to work for you. My time and contributions will not be appropriately valued by such a company and I won't like working there. My skills/value are not commodity. I don't want to start out a hopefully multi-year relationship on dishonesty.

I imagine though that if you explicitly call it a weed out that a sizable percentage of the quality talent pool won't apply...unless they're a referral, and then why are they doing a code challenge anyway?

On that note: giving code challenges to employee referrals, especially hiring to their own teams, is a clear indicator that you don't trust your employees.

[IanCal]

I guess I'm not really sure what the difference is, the entire point of all hiring processes is to "weed out" those that you don't want to hire. Otherwise what's the point?

> My time and contributions will not be appropriately valued by such a company and I won't like working there

I don't get how that's related.

> I don't want to start out a hopefully multi-year relationship on dishonesty.

There's no dishonesty there, the applicants were given a simple task to do in order to progress to the next step. If you're applying for a software engineer position and cannot even make a decent attempt at an extremely simple task when given complete flexibility then it's a waste of both of our time to continue.

(edit - I should point out that this was not at my current employer)